


Sea people

by aster_risk



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 05:56:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19806127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: Five pivotal moments between Jenny and Kate, beginning and ending with a white sailboat.





	Sea people

1.

Jenny is shot on Thursday. Two small scraps of metal bursts in her side; someone with a gun decides she must be cut like a flank steak, but as it turns out raging men with pistols don’t have the best aim. 

So there she is, bright and snarky in the hospital on Friday morning, insisting that she’s fine; she can go home now; it only grazed her. She’s right. It only grazed her. But because it was a bullet, they keep her all day. Kate sits next to her as she sleeps off the pain, holding a magazine in one hand and Jenny’s fingers in the other, to be sure she’s not a ghost.

Kate’s parents call as she drives home Jenny, loopy on anesthesia. They ask when she’ll settle down, when they’ll get a wedding invitation or a pregnancy announcement, and they’re okay with getting both at the same time (they’re not). They ask if she’s met someone, and she says, “yes” to make them happy, doesn’t tell them it’s Jenny. Jennifer Shepard, the Director, the lover, the gauze-wrapped woman whose blood is almost as red as her hair. 

2.

Jenny was a mermaid-child. Kate never would’ve guessed, but in hindsight, it makes sense. She had an Army Colonel father and a Boston-Irish mother and an inheritance so old that no one remembers who died for her family to get it. She lived her summers in a pale blue A-frame in the Hamptons, learning how to fish for things bigger than her, how to pilot a boat, how to spot a lighthouse through the fog. 

She hasn’t been back since her father died, but Kate feels a welling of _something_ watching her stride barefoot down the beach. She kicks at the water, and when it dries salt sparkles on her skin. Mermaid-child. 

Later, she takes them onto the water. Jenny wears more white here, and more green, clothes that flap in the wind, that Kate has never seen before but wouldn’t belong to anyone else. Kate can feel age-old calluses finally earning their keep when Jenny touches her palm, presses a faded rope into her hands and tells her to haul the sails. Kate kisses her in lieu of an “aye, Captain.” She can’t help it, not when Jenny’s freckles are starting show again, not when she grins like that—the crooked dimpled grin of a Siren finally coming home.

**3.**

Kate wanders into the bullpen Monday morning tanned from the Virginia summer, with special-occasion liquors in her throat and a soft, gold engagement ring she can’t decide whether to hide or show off.

They never told anyone when they kissed beneath the porch light of a Mediterranean restaurant. At first, Kate was worried about Tony’s smarmy remarks, Jenny about the judging faces. They both had to face the wolves, but Jenny’s were dressed in fine suits. Then it began to feel as though they’d spoil something by telling anyone, like they’d bring a spell of bad luck.

Gibbs found out. She’s still not sure how, but she wasn’t surprised. If he cared, he didn’t show it. She suspected he had, at first, but that he hadn’t talked to her until he got over it. Gibbs was smart that way. Despite being the poster boy for Roman stoicism, he was damned nostalgic. He harbored any number of feelings; he just didn’t address them to anybody else. It hadn’t helped him, but it wasn’t wrong.

Tony’s eyes light up the minute they spot the gold band on her finger. He doesn’t get enough credit for his detective’s eyes, but that’s because he abuses his powers. “You finally going to tell us about your mysterious swain, Kate, or are you going to marry him in secret and hide him from us until you die?”

She leans forward with a sweet little smile and rests her chin on her palms. “You wanna know about my _swain_ Tony?” McGee, to his credit, is at least pretending not to listen, but Tony is utterly intrigued. 

A wicked look crosses his face, and Kate knows the day will end with her putting him in a headlock at the gym. “Kate, do tell me—”

“Something on your mind?” Jenny appears behind the desk, and Tony jumps out of his chair. 

“No! Nothing. Gah,” he mutters. When he looks up— “Morning, Director. I was just congratulating Agent Todd. Her mystery man seems to have proposed.”

Jenny cocks an eyebrow. “Oh, I know,” she says mildly. Only Kate catches the smirk. She shrugs, meets Jenny’s eyes. Good a time as any.

Tony, for his part, is all insult and melodrama. “You already knew?” He turns to Kate. “Why would tell the _Director_ before me?”

Jenny rolls her eyes. “Because I’m the one who put the ring there, Dinozzo.” She pats his shoulder and drops a couple of files on his desk, then struts back up the staircase. 

Tony is quiet. Kate ignores him and goes back to her work. Better to enjoy the silence now. He’ll be full of boyish, obnoxious questions later. 

4\. 

They marry quietly, not in the church Kate always imagined she’d get married in, or the sailboat Jenny dreamed of as a child. No, they marry in the soft grass of Jenny’s brownstone, on an underwhelming Monday in July. Ducky officiates, because he’s Ducky and of course he has an officiant’s license. Everyone brings a dish; Gibbs brings bourbon. It’s the first time she’s seen him really smile, so you can see the crows’ feet on his eyes and the spark of youth in him. 

Jenny looks something medieval, resplendent in green like a shieldmaiden or a sharper Titania. Kate’s mother once told her, when she was seven, _you don’t have to be a woman right now. You’ll know when you are._

Until now, she’d forgotten it. It wasn’t as if she’d waited for womanhood to hit her like a brick to the head. She’d sailed through her adolescence and into her Secret Service career, but she knows she’s a woman when she stands in a white tea-dress in the quiet suburb of Georgetown and meets Jenny’s eyes.

5\. 

It is a hazy August in the Hamptons, when a sailboat crashes into the black cliffs. The summer their son is born, that’s how Kate remembers it, because she remembers his little feet against her palm, and she remembers her arms wrapped around Jenny’s waist, holding them fast against the wind like teaching her to fly. Mer-creature, unused to babies or wings. 

The boat tears into shore on a clear day, that’s the strangest part of it. Not a cloud in the sky. They are walking the shore, just below Jenny’s family A-frame—Kate and Jenny and the unborn baby, and Jenny’s mother who has cancer but won’t admit it. Fisherman line the water, talking in an English Kate doesn’t understand, never will. Jenny might have, once, on a boat with her father. 

A man pilots a white sailboat. It flaps erratically in the distance, and Jenny notices first—Jenny, who knows how to raise a canvas in monsoon season. It’s age-old knowledge, Jenny said; no matter how long she spends in DC, in her desert-orange office, she won’t forget how to sail. 

She’d told Kate that when they were sitting in a hospital waiting room. Tony was inside this time, having a knife wound stitched up by a pretty nurse. She’d told Kate she would never forget how a canvas looks in a full gust; then she’d offered to carry the baby. Because Tony was inside with a stab wound, she said. 

“Well Dinozzo wasn’t going to have our kid.” But she was afraid Jenny would say that. Afraid, because Jenny was also Jen Shepard, the Director, and Kate was the only person anyone had imagined would carry their child. But Kate knew the risks of fieldwork, and she loved what she did. She was restless, forever a detective. Jenny was restless too, but of the mind. 

So it was settled, in a way no one but Kate saw coming.

And by summer, they are standing on a Hamptons beach, spending their comp time on a surreal leave, and the winds have left them rosy and cool. Kate can’t take her eyes off of Jenny, softened by pregnancy but weathered by the sea air. She holds onto her hand like a mooring. In the distance, a man pilots a white sailboat, out of control toward the shore.

The crash is quieter than Kate imagined. The boat careens the way she never thought a sailboat could be, like the hand of Poseidon is pushing it mercilessly along. Canvas wraps around the rocks like an overnight tattoo; crafted wood is smashed against driftwood, and the captain dies without a sound.

When they give their statements to the police, Kate doesn’t realize she’s holding onto the baby. (Jenny will tell her, later, because she’s candid about that kind of thing.) They talk about it half like a crime scene and half like a novella tragedy. 

The coroners pull up in a banana-yellow van. “He was drunk,” they conclude, “on Sauvignon.” 

It is absurd. Jenny watches them load the pilot into the back of the van, arms crossed over her chest like Kate has seen her do at Ducky’s autopsy table. 

Jenny’s mother says, “I’ll get better you know.”

And their son is born that night.

**Author's Note:**

> I maintain that this wrote itself. It is so far from how I typically write Jenny, but here we are, and I kinda like where I am.


End file.
